Just Part of the Journey

Don't expect anything, and you won't be disappointed.

[brianmalcom]

My Plate of Cookies

There was a lot going on in my life the year I got laid off.  Our youngest wasn’t even one year old, we just put an addition on the house and we had a new dog.  My wife and I were listening to the financial advice of radio talk show host Dave Ramsey and considering living debt free.  So, we decided it would be nice to get away over Memorial Day weekend and go to the beach.

The weekend was lovely and I don’t remember it being particularly cold, wet, and rainy; always a bonus when visiting the Oregon coast.  It was on our way back, as my wife read from Dave’s The Total Money Makeover, that we decided to go debt free.  One particular point that I recall from Dave’s book is that once you have decided to live debt free, there will be some point along the journey that your commitment to your decision will be tested.

I think we took a couple extra days of vacation at the coast so it must have been Wednesday or Thursday when I finally headed back to work.  And the day was to be a special occasion; the head of my department was retiring and we were to have a potluck lunch in his honor.  So, with my plate of freshly baked cranberry treasure cookies in hand, I strode into the department.  As I approached the dessert table, the new manager asked me into his office.

I set the cookies on the table.  “Brian, can I see you in my office?”  The words are still hanging in the air like a cartoon balloon attached to his mouth.  I walked into the office as he quietly shut the door behind me.  There had already been two rounds of layoffs over the last year so I knew what was coming.  I was surprised at how calm I was receiving the news.  It was almost liberating in a way.  In that quick, five minute meeting, my new purpose in life was clearly defined for me:  get a job, any job.  I had a wife, kids, a house payment and I had just committed to live debt free.  Dave said there would be a test, I just didn’t know it would be so soon.

Those cookies, those lovely cranberry treasure cookies now had a new name around my house: “the layoff cookies”.  They didn’t deserve this bad juju associated with them.  It wasn’t their fault.  They’re just cookies!  Sorry, but you are no longer a delicious, fruity, sweet treat, you are now a pithy, bitter reminder of a dark day in the Malcom family.

Actually, I don’t remember it being dark and dreary.  I remember getting closer to God and my wife; praying the rosary daily for a new job and for all those that were unemployed (it was 2009, so there were a lot of people out of work).  And I was hopeful that God would lead me into a better life.

I did find a new job, and very quickly.  I was only out of work for two weeks.  Between the severance pay, the unemployment check, and my new job, I actually made more that month than any other that year.  The job gave me a raise, it was closer to home, the hours were more flexible, and it presented me with new challenges.

It is now nine years later and I’ve decided to change careers.  And I’ve decided that I need to erase the bad juju attached to one of my favorite cookies as I move on to a new adventure.  So, I am going to make two plates of cookies.  One plate I will bring with me on my last day with my current employer.  This will change the attachment of the cookies from a day when my career happened to me, to a day that I intentionally made a positive change in my career.

The second plate of cookies will be for sharing with the team at my new job to celebrate the potential that new opportunities hold.  A sweet celebration of success that came from a year of determined searching.  It was both an inner search and an outward job search to match the particular way I was evolving.

Bad juju be gone!  Let me savor the sweetness of those cranberry treasure cookies once more.

So, what is your plate of cookies?  What symbol do you have in your life that is a reminder of a failure or unhappy event?  How can you turn it around to be a symbol of how you are transforming your life for the better?  If you are on a journey of transformation to lead a healthier life, whether that be in your career, spirituality, physical health, or personal relationships, don’t forget to celebrate your victories along the way.

[brianmalcom]

Journey to Greatness

What does it mean to be great?  When you think of great people of history, who comes to mind and why?  Were they great political or military leaders?  Did they invent something that changed the world?  Did they serve people tirelessly?

To me, I think that greatness is when you take your skills, talents, and particular situation in life and use them to the fullest extent.  I’m 47 years old and am only just now beginning to think about being intentional with my career.  Up to this point, I’ve just kind of let my career happen to me.  It never occurred to me that I could actually take control of my career.  Or maybe I knew I could and should be in control, but I didn’t want to take the responsibility.

Because, if I was making active decisions about my career and I ended up in the wrong place, it would be my own damn fault.  If I just let the wind blow me where it will, then I can throw my rage at the fates if I don’t like my situation.

I’ve been going on a lot of interviews over the past year and it has helped me to start to solidify who I am and what I am good at.  In college, I studied engineering because it ran in the family and I was pretty good at math and science.  Plus, I knew you could make money as an engineer.  So, I went to my dad’s Alma Mater, graduated with a bachelor’s degree, and got a job as an engineer.

But in all that time in school, and in all the years after that working as an engineer, I never really stopped to look at myself and ask if I was doing the thing that I was meant to do.  And I’m not talking about some romantic notion of a fated destiny that I was meant to fulfill.  Ken Coleman, author of One Question, sums it up nicely by calling it your “sweet spot”; that intersection of your greatest strengths and your greatest passion.

Now that I’ve had a chance to do some of that introspection, I think my greatest strengths lie in the fact that I’m very detail oriented and I love planning, organizing, and leading.  And I’m very passionate about a number of things.  One of the passions that I had when I was younger was music.  I think my dream job would be to be writing and directing musicals, a Broadway stage manager, or experiential marketing.  But to pursue that path would be impractical at my age.  But I’m passionate about many other things that fit better with my engineering experience.

So now I see myself charting a course in some type of leadership position.  Perhaps something that uses my creative, musical side as well.  It’s all part of the journey.  If you are a life-long learner, self-discovery is a natural result.  For those of us that gain that self-awareness later in life, it is like a burden lifted from your shoulders; finally free of who you thought you needed to be, and ready to accept who you were meant to be.  And for those that see who they were meant to be early in life, I suppose those are the ones destined for greatness.

[brianmalcom]

Slow is Fast

My boys have been playing baseball for many years.  And, like any sport, there are many lessons learned on the field that can apply to home, work, and life in general.  One of my favorites from baseball is that when you need to make a throw to a base to get the out, slow is fast.

When the ball is live and the runner is running flat out to the base, the defense knows they need to hurry to get the ball to their teammate or they won’t get the out.  However, if they hurry to the point that they lose the proper mechanics, many things can go wrong: they miss fielding the ball cleanly, they fumble the transition from glove to hand, they don’t set up for the throw, or, worst of all, they overthrow the baseman and the runner advances another base.  What the coach is trying to teach them by saying “slow is fast” is that they need to take the time to do each step properly: field the ball, transition, setup, and throw.

In business, I’ve seen it too many times when companies get in “firefighting” mode and rush to a solution without doing the proper checks along the way that they would normally do.  There are three areas of risk that aren’t addressed when they do this: 1) Will the solution even work?  2) What is the cost of fixing it in the field?  3) How will this reflect on our company if it doesn’t work?

I’ve always lived in the world of manufacturing physical products so I’ll use that as my example.  You can apply this to any situation where a quick solution is needed, but I’ll use an example I’m most familiar with.

Our team had a situation where we had positioned a hydraulic reservoir too low in the system.  When a moving part of the system raised up too high, hydraulic oil would run back to the reservoir and come pouring out of the breather cap on the top of the reservoir.

Now, to set the stage in a little more detail, the project is already way behind schedule and the customer wants the system up and running yesterday.  Also, the project is in another country so the shipping logistics are complicated and time consuming (a good reason to get it right the first time, right.  Oops, I’m foreshadowing).

Our solution was a simple one: raise the breather up above the highest point that the moving part would ever reach using an adapter and extension hose.  Easy.  So, one of our team members quickly grabbed a handful of parts to do the job and set a fabricator to work on welding them together.  In about a day, we had a painted adapter and some hose sitting in shipping, ready to fly off to the customer to be installed.

Concurrent to this activity, one of our engineers put the design concept into the 3D model that we had of the complete system.  He discovered that a bracket sitting above the breather port was a likely interference with the new adapter.  However, the engineer didn’t complete the layout until after the components of the new part were welded together and painted.  So, when the team came together to review what the engineer discovered, the person who came up with the solution said, “I’m not going to start second guessing now.  They can fix it in the field if its a problem.”

Let’s look at this from the risk standpoint I mentioned above:

1) Will the solution even work?  What checks have been done in evaluating the situation?  What tools do you have at your disposal to evaluate the solution?  Although you don’t have the time to launch into a full blown design process, there are surely some simple evaluations that you can do minimize risk in this area.  If our team had taken the one or two hours that the engineer needed to model the solution, they would have had time to make some simple adjustments and avoided any potential interference.  

2) What is the cost of fixing it in the field?   The general rule I’ve always used is that it costs about ten times as much to fix a problem in the field than to fix it before it leaves the shop.  I don’t have any data at my fingertips to back this up but it makes sense when you look at the logistics of doing repairs in the field: lack of tools, materials, and proper facilities, environmental factors, the pressure of having the customer watching your every move, and the cost of a lot of people standing around waiting for you to fix the problem.  Plus, if you need any parts from your shop, hopefully they can be shipped quickly to site (they couldn’t in this case for reasons I mentioned above).

3) How will this reflect on our company if it doesn’t work?  The customer is already unhappy because the original solution didn’t work as expected.  What will it do to your reputation if the fix your team sends up is no fix at all?  You never know what is going to be the tipping point between getting that next job or not.

Ultimately, our fix worked with only minor adjustments in the field.  Nevertheless, it was obvious that we ignored or didn’t anticipate the potential interference.  And from looking at it you could easily tell that it was a patch to a problem.  Simply put, it didn’t help our reputation in our customer’s eyes.

It’s never a fun time when the original solution that you’ve given to your customer doesn’t work.  However, and especially in custom or prototype systems, it is not the worst situation.  Depending on how you handle it, your company can come out looking more robust in the end.  Most customers aren’t unreasonable and expect that there will be parts of the project that won’t go as planned.  What they are looking for is someone who can handle the situation with expediency and professionalism.  Yet expediency usually becomes a hurried panic where the team forgets to communicate and hit all the critical steps of developing a robust solution for the customer.  In the name of reacting fast to customer needs, the steps of a good design process are bypassed.  If your team takes the time to do each step properly, in the end, you deliver a fix that will work the first time and get a win with your customer.

[brianmalcom]

Scouting for Truth

I’m trying to establish a new routine for 2017 where I get up for a morning run before work while listening to inspirational or enlightening material like the TED Radio Hour.  I actually started this routine in 2016 but sort of fell out of practice over the last few months.  So in this article, I wanted to expand on one the podcasts I listened to recently.

The TED podcast I listened to was called “Democracy on Trial” with a collection of speakers asking if democracy is truly our best option.  The podcast can be found here:

http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/495116376

One of the enlightening voices I heard was Julia Galef, writer and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality.  She spoke about motivated reasoning which she dubbed the “soldier mindset”; that place we find ourselves when we pick a side on an issue and are highly motivated to find fault with those that disagree, and give little examination to anything that supports our point of view.

She also presents an alternative:  the “scout mindset”.  She defines it as “trying to get an accurate picture of reality,  even when that’s unpleasant or inconvenient.”

I heard this and was immediately taken with how applicable this idea is in the current political and social climate.  Yes, a classless buffoon is about to take the seat of the highest political office in our nation.  It’s not the first time and it certainly won’t be the last.  And, the soldier mindset is driving us to pick sides and prepare for war.

However, this is the time that we all need to come together as scouts; listening to each other and hearing, really hearing, what the other person has to say.  That also means you’re also going to actually have to talk to those that disagree with you.  And you’ll have to listen, respectfully, graciously.  I think you’ll find that even though you will never agree with that other person, you will come to a better understanding of their position.  I also think you’ll find they aren’t as unreasonable as you expect them to be.  This could be one of the hardest things we have to do, but to work through this, it will be absolutely essential.

I think one of the reasons that man, Mr. Trump, got elected, is that many people, reasonable people, were tired of the big cities and liberal politicians making decisions for them.  And that’s what Clinton represented: liberal big city thinking and more of the same politics.  It wasn’t that they particularly liked Trump, it was that the alternative was so much worse.

Love your neighbor, a value that crosses all human constructed divisions, both religious and secular, is the key to a scout mindset.  That person sitting across from you spouting hateful rhetoric is a person that needs love just like you.  Put the sword and shield down, open yourself up, and start scouting.  I’m not naive, I know that some people like to be angry and get off on the powerful feeling of hating others and will see you as weak.  However, your openness may just get them to drop their weapons, and they may start scouting too.

[brianmalcom]

Customer Service, Please

In the following bloggle, the monetary values are fictional, but the characters (and personal pain) are real....

To the U.S. Government, Customer Service Department:

I am writing to you to request a refund for my purchase of the program, “U.S. Federal Government” (USFG).  Although I have been on subscription with USFG for many years, I am only seeking a refund for the 2014 version.

In looking over my contract titled, “U.S. Constitution”, I discovered that many of the modules that have been added over the years are in violation of the contractually defined scope that this program was to provide.  In addition, I am unhappy with the performance of many of the modules and would like to see improvements made to their efficiency.

My total payment of $12,547 for 2014 breaks down as follows:

Health Care:  $1,701

National Defense:  $1,480

Job and Family Security:  $1,125

Interest on Debt:  $562

Veterans Benefits:  $367

Education and Job Training:  $221

Immigration, Law Enforcement, and Administration of Justice:  $123

International Affairs:  $115

Natural Resources, Energy, and Environment:  $102

Science, Space, and Technology  Programs:  $70

Agriculture:  $60

Community, Area, and Regional  Development:  $27

Response to Natural Disasters:  $24

Government:  $211

Social Security:  $5,153

Medicare:  $1,206

 I have highlighted in bold the modules that appear to be a legitimate part of the agreed upon scope of supply as detailed in the aforementioned contract.  Although I am interested in some of the other modules, I think they can be better provided by smaller, local providers of these products (and at a lower cost).

 The total of the out-of-scope modules comes to $10,360.  I am seeking a refund of this amount.  Contact me for an address to send the check to.

Sincerely,

Brian C. Malcom

P.S.  A note on the “debt” module:

Interest on Debt:  although I appreciate the transparency, I am disheartened by the percent of my payment that is going to satisfy the mismanagement of funds.  I suggest Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University as a path to robust fiscal health.  It would be an impressive display for an organization of your size to shout a collective, “We’re debt free!” if you can commit to the necessary austerity.